Police Quell Protest in Beijing Over Woman’s Death

By EDWARD WONG

May 8, 2013

BEIJING — Hundreds of police officers in riot gear were deployed into the streets surrounding a shopping mall in southern Beijing on Wednesday to contain a large protest that was ignited by the death of a 22-year-old woman rumored to have been raped by security guards.

Word of the death spread on the Internet in the days after the woman, whose surname was Yuan, was initially said to have committed suicide by jumping from a top floor or roof of the mall, called Jingwen, last Friday. Rumors on the Internet said Ms. Yuan, a migrant worker from Anhui Province, had been raped by private security guards in the mall, where she worked, and might have been thrown to her death.

The police have issued a statement saying there was nothing abnormal about the body. Many of the protesters who turned up on Wednesday were also migrant workers from Anhui, which is a relatively poor province in central China. Censors for Internet companies blocked searches on microblogs for the name of the mall. By evening, the protesters had dispersed, but officers remained.